Artist: Leonardo Da Vinci
Date: 1490
Size: 20 x 15 cm
Museum: Royal Collection (London, United Kingdom)
Technique: Drawing
The principal drawing imagines the head sectioned through the middle, its layers likened to those of an onion, and listed as ‘hair; scalp; muscular flesh; pericranium arising from the dura mater; cranium, that is, bone; dura mater; pia mater; brain’. Leonardo correctly shows the meningeal membrane of the dura mater extending along the optic nerve to the eye. Within the brain, Leonardo drew the cerebral ventricles as three bulbous cavities. These were believed to house the mental faculties: the first was where the mind’s ‘raw material’ was gathered – the senso commune, imagination and fantasy; in the second this information was processed, through reasoning and so on; and the third was where the results were stored, in the memory. At lower right the head is seen from above with the crown of the head flipped back, the optic and auditory nerves converging on the first ventricle. But Leonardo was unconvinced by this arrangement, repeatedly trying different layouts, and he later abandoned the traditional system of the localisation of mental faculties. On the verso of this sheet is a drawing of an old man
Artist |
|
|---|---|
Download |
|
Permissions |
Free for non commercial use. See below. |
 |
This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. However - you may not use this image for commercial purposes and you may not alter the image or remove the watermark. This applies to the United States, Canada, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.
|
Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may
not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the
